Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

Outside, Moskovsky station was more than usually heavy with police; something was happening, or somebody suspected that something was about to happen. The open wound of the terror-torn south, blood seeping up the railway lines, dripping into the cities one bead at a time, and the same solution here as everywhere else in the world: tighten the tourniquet. With one finger in his ear against the remorselessly careering traffic, Henry could not raise Zoya in person. Her number was ringing, which was something, but either she was asleep or she wasn’t answering. It was getting late, but still… you would hope that of all people, private detectives would pick up after-hours calls.

He drew a lungful of the damp air; tonight it felt as if the sky itself were weighed down by something vast and alien above. There would be a proper thunderstorm soon. The weather made him nervous. The police made him nervous. The cars swinging madly around the war monument made him nervous. Maria Glover’s death made him nervous. Everything made him nervous. Everything—except his fix, his boy. He tried again and this time left a message. This is Henry Wheyland. I met you last year regarding Arkady Alexandrovitch. I understand that Maria Glover has passed away, and we wondered if you could…

To the people hurrying by, he looked more like the glimpse of some Grimm-conceived scarecrow than a human being, standing there in the half-light of a cigarette shop, the letters of the station illuminated behind him—MOSKOVSKY VOKZAL, his jacket hanging slack on his frame as he murmured things into an ancient cell phone in a slightly academic Russian, for whom?

From the moment the Mongeese came back on, Henry could see that Arkady knew his mother was dead. Something in his manner told. Told that everything in his world had been detonated again. Told that here was a man changed—changing—even as he took his seat. Though they could not know the reason, the whole room seemed to feel the change too, seemed to be craning forward collectively, as if the rumor had gone around that they were about to witness some pivotal moment of nature.

The band played ensemble for a few bars. The saxophone took a short solo over the chord sequence. The trumpet followed. And then, almost hurriedly, they were back together. This was a song not so much fast as urgent, a song of avowal in an importuning six/eight.

One by one, the other musicians began to withdraw from the tune, like a ballet chorus inching toward the wings in anticipation of the grand jeté of the principal male. The horn players stepped back from their microphones, a quickened fade; then, stealthily, the bass player likewise dropped away, leaving just Arkady and Yevgeny. Old friends, these two, and Henry found himself leaning toward their play along with everyone else. Arkady began to let his fingers work a little faster, running mini-scales around and around and up and down, loosening the knots of time, until the beat itself began to crumble away and Yevgeny likewise disappeared into silence.

And suddenly the piano was alone.

There was something tight in the lines of Arkady’s brow that Henry had not seen before. Something strange was happening to Arkady’s relationship to the piano too. It was as if he had begun to live—breathe, talk, move—only through the keyboard. As if the instrument were becoming part of him, the keys no more than an extension of his arms and his arms merely a lateral articulation of the keys, the dampers, the singing wires themselves. To eye now, as well as to ear, pianist and piano were one and the same. As a man might inhabit his own body, so Arkady appeared to inhabit the mass or density of his instrument, as if he had assumed command not only of sound but also of the space and time that the piano occupied—could ever occupy—as if every capability of the instrument was known and understood and all alike were his to deploy or withhold on the instant. As if the quick of his will was alive in the grain of the soundboard.

At first he stayed with what was familiar—clearly recognizable variations on the tune, each bowing decorously and paying due respect to its progenitor; but bar by bar he began to stretch convention, risking more, straying further. The room’s breath was stilled and the tune was unrecognizably transformed, and the notes were shimmering and shimmying, pouring and pouring, cascading out of the piano in great glittering waterfalls of sound, dazzling, dancing, and yet each individual purposely lit in its own special livery of color and tone. He was playing as Henry had never heard him play: back and forth across rhythm and time signatures, the first beat of the bar long ago discarded (though hiding somewhere, Henry could sense, in between notes). And yet the Russian seemed determined that no single person be left behind on his journey, so he kept doubling back to the almost-forgotten tune, sounding echoes in adjacent registers, raising finger posts, urging the whole club along with him, stragglers too, all bound, faster and faster, for some new upland of music that he wanted to show them… And now, just as they were all arriving on the very summit, just as people were raising their hands to clap, as if by magic, he was gone. Vanished through some secret trapdoor, only to reappear somewhere far below them all… And where did all this sudden sadness come from? Or was this the tune again? Not quite. Not quite. Something else, something heartbreaking, something profound, something solemn… And then, just as Arkady seemed lost for good, here he came once more, racing back with his left hand to greet the momentarily beleaguered audience, a wide grimace spreading across his face that became now almost a grin, and in three quick figures he had brought the whole swirling madness under control, and—astonishingly, astoundingly—there was that old beat again, that importuning six/eight, and one by one the other musicians picked up their instruments and stepped forward and Arkady was back in the original key and his arms were open wide in warm-hearted musical invitation, and in they all came in perfect formation, because yes, there it was again—beat number one, and only in that moment of resolution, somehow, did the entire solo make sense, and the old men in their Soviet jackets were clapping and even the endless self-appraisal of the Gucci couples was finally vanquished, and on the Mongeese went, all together, Arkady looking around, catching the eyes of the others, finger briefly raised to poke them up a semitone from F to F sharp, the nightmare key, but no matter or fear, for all five of them were playing as if there were nothing else in the world to say or do but sound these very notes this night in this very order, and neither Henry nor anybody else in the club ever saw or heard anything like it ever again, because on learning that his fragile world might be about to collapse back into the misfortune and misery from which it had so briefly risen, Arkady Alexandrovich had taken a private vow: to free himself from the endless agony of these contingent circumstances, to never again sit down to play another piano until he knew for certain that he could play forever or not at all and be damned.

At noon the following day, Wednesday, Gabriel walked due west along Nevsky, passing among the crowds clustering at the metro station, looking neither right nor left but waiting self-possessed in their midst to cross at the lights, then on again, stepping up the high curb and so to the Kazansky Bridge—cries in coarse Russian from below, the canal-tour boats, a tout shouting in English, the muddy water silent. Glancing neither down nor across the dusty road at the great curved colonnades of Kazan Cathedral, he went on, the narrow angle of dead ahead all that he permitted himself.